September 07, 2014

Brain-to-brain 'Telepathic' Communication Achieved For The First Time

For the first time, scientists
have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another
without any contact between the two, thousands of miles apart in India and
France.

Research led by experts at
Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one
person's brain to another's even, as in this case, if they are thousands of
miles away.

"It is kind of technological
realisation of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio
Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, told AFP by
phone from Barcelona.

"We are using technology to
interact electromagnetically with the brain."

For the experiment, one person
wearing a wireless, internet-linked electroencephalogram or EEG would think a
simple greeting, like "hola," or "ciao."

A computer translated the words
into digital binary code, presented by a series of 1s or 0s.Then, this message was emailed
from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who through
non-invasive brain stimulation could see flashes of light in their peripheral
vision.

The subjects receiving the
message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to
report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message.

"We wanted to find out if one
could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity
from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so
across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways,"
said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical
School.

"One such pathway is, of course,
the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would
bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct
brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other
in India and France?'"

Ruffini added that extra care was
taken to make sure no sensory information got in the way that could have
influenced the interpretation of the message.

Researchers have been attempting
to send a message from person to person this way for about a decade, and the
proof of principle that was reported in the journal PLOS ONE is still
rudimentary, he told AFP.

"We hope that in the longer term
this could radically change the way we communicate with each other," said
Ruffini.